Some people just have music in their blood, and Nabil Ayers is one of them. As the president of the Beggars Group record label, he has overseen releases from the National, Grimes and St. Vincent, just to name a few. He’s also a prolific writer, and he’ll be at Criminal Records this Sunday to discuss his new memoir, “My Life in the Sunshine.” The book explores his minimal relationship with his father, the legendary jazz musician Roy Ayers. “City Lights” senior producer Kim Drobes dove deeper into Ayers’ story.
Though he became fascinated with his ancestry throughout his life, Nabil Ayers never knew his father — he once said his father was “really just DNA.” But he knew his parents’ story. In 1971, Louise Braufman, a white, Jewish former ballerina, chose to have a child with the famous Black jazz musician Roy Ayers. Braufman didn’t want a co-parent, preferring to have and raise her own child, which she did. Today, Nabil’s a successful creator and entrepreneur, and a series of recent discoveries about his family tree sparked the desire to explore the lineage in writing.
Speaking about his upbringing, and his mother’s unique choice to consensually conceive the son she’d raise alone, Ayers said, “It was a very unique situation, but there wasn’t a divorce — he didn’t leave us — so I was ‘okay.’ And all of that’s true, but it was hard to get deeper than that with people. But weirdly, writing about it was easier, and then once I started writing about it and started publishing things, that’s when more family started to get in touch.”
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